The Chosen One
by HamsterMasterSamster
Summary: After the revelations in Trabia Garden, Zell visits Balamb Town . . . and the woman he's always known as Ma. Zell Dincht one-shot.


One time, Zell had been reading the cafeteria menu and been struck by how wrong the word _ sandwich _ looked.

Obviously nobody had snuck by and changed how language worked between breakfast and lunch, but nonetheless, during his anguished search for something half as appetising as a sold-out hotdog, the familiar string of letters had turned into gibberish before his eyes. He couldn't have explained _ why _ it wasn't right, or how to fix it; some subtle component of his reading comprehension had simply broken. The well-known connection between the concept of a common bread snack and the written word that represented it had just . . . poofed, right out of his head.

That was how he felt about the door. It just looked _ wrong_.

Salt in the coastal breeze took a long time to worry the pale curves of white stone that formed the architecture of Balamb Town, but it quickly devoured even the hardest of wood surfaces. The townsfolk always weatherproofed their timber fixtures and fittings with a warm, rosy paint that made the whorls in the grain glow in the balmy sun.

Zell stood transfixed by the patterns they formed in his own front door. He'd been here a thousand times but had he ever really _ looked _ at them? The disorienting sense of unidentifiable change squirmed in the pit of his belly. Hadn't that cluster of squiggly ripples been closer to the hinge? Had that huge knot in the top left, with all the other lines in the grain diverting around it, always been there?

His hand had been hovering over the door knob for a few minutes now. He drew it back to his side. Clenched and unclenched his fists. Flexed his neck and bounced from foot to foot to try and shake the apprehension out of himself.

It didn't work. Internally he was clinging onto an out-of-control jackhammer for dear life.

And what was with this weird, unsettling sense that he should _ knock _ first?

"C'mon, you damn . . . _ chickenwuss_."

Muttered through gritted teeth, the hated insult dislodged . . . something. Zell grabbed the handle, gave it a forceful twist and pushed through into the Dincht family home.

The cooler air of the shady stone hollow enveloped him and he paused again on the threshold, his sneakers sinking against the stiff fibers of the welcome mat. Old, easygoing recordings of a local guitarist, tinny but charming, were strumming out from the music player nestled amongst the family photographs on a rosewood shelf. The savoury smell of still-cooking fish stew wafted enticingly through the room and was a nostalgic punch to the nostrils. A plum raincoat and matching hat, virtually unworn this season, hung from one of the bronze prongs of the stand just past the doorway. And if he looked further to the left -

"Zell!"

Her warm, resounding voice flooded the reception chamber. Of course she was there; her slippered feet had worn dips into the flagstones by the sink, where her stout, apron-clad figure commanded the tiny kitchen alcove with the ease of long practice. Her hair was scraped back in a practical tail and her dark eyes, glittering with rich emotion and wisdom, brightened when they settled on him.

It was like the universe had just pressed pause on the scene the last time he'd walked out of the door, and only now resumed the playback. He'd battled his way across half the world since he'd last left this house, and his mother might not have moved an inch.

"Hey, Ma." Zell clicked the door shut quietly behind him - or attempted to. Somehow it still sounded too loud in the cosy walls of his home. "You doin' okay?"

"Oh, I'm fine, same as always. No company today, hm?"

"Nah, sorry - just me this time." Zell had warned the others away from his residence today on pain of _ death_.

"Well, that's a shame. You know how much I love meeting your friends." She chuckled wickedly. "But I suppose you'll do, in a pinch. You're staying for dinner?"

There was a question mark there, somewhere, well-hidden in the verbiage, because it certainly wasn't reflected in her tone of voice. Zell fidgeted his way into the reception chamber proper, hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched up to his ears. His left leg was so restless it was about to drill through the floor with a vibrating heel. "O-of course! Love to! Gotta make the most of these drop-ins now that, you know . . . Garden flies off to other continents on the regular, and all."

His mother beamed at him, and Zell was stung by the irrational desire to shrink away from her light.

"Good! We haven't caught up properly in a long time. Just the other day I had old man Travers at the junk shop asking me about how you were getting on, after you cleared up all that trouble with the Galbadians here, and I didn't know what to tell him!" She clucked her tongue. "It's good that you're getting to travel, but I ought to have a word with that Headmaster of yours."

"Ma -"

"You didn't sign up for international schooling."

"Sure, I did! SeeD missions can be all over."

"Even so! There should be strictly scheduled shore leave. So you can come back here and cause trouble now and then, instead of doing it in foreign countries." His mother belly-laughed. "Can't forget your roots, you know."

_ Roots_. Zell's gaze drifted to the photographs near the music player. There were two of them and they were always just _ there_. He never had to think about them at all. In the oldest of the pair, a strong Balamb breeze was trying to steal away the trails of long, dark hair owned by his much younger Ma. A cheerful man in a fishing hat held one arm around her broad shoulders, and had the other planted in the unruly blond fluff atop the head of the boy climbing through the harbour railing between them. Had that boy always looked so . . . awkward there? Like he was a little out of place?

Like he didn't quite _ belong?_

"-ell? Zell!"

He flinched, spinning back to the kitchen. His mother had a fist against one hip, and was eyeing him with a deadly single arched brow.

"I _ said _you could go and make yourself comfy. Dinner will be half-hour, but I'll make us some tea."

"Oh, sure! Sure. Thanks, Ma."

Zell skulked into the sitting room, slumping into a tactical seat at the far side of the low table where his mother couldn't see him. Her voice still drifted in from the kitchen, washing over him like a barrage of waves littered with the names of people in town and updates on their latest local dramas. She wasn't a gossip, but she was a pillar of the community and everyone in town talked to her about everything and anything that happened in sleepy Balamb. Normally he liked hearing about the stuff he'd missed, the people he'd grown up with . . .

Or thought he'd grown up with.

Zell planted his fists quietly on the table and stared at them. Abruptly, his gaze refocused on the solid, polished surface between them. Almost squarely in the middle of that space was an imperfection - an inch-long, ragged chunk torn out of the wood. He unclenched one fist. Explored the crag with a fingertip.

He hadn't _ meant _to. The sitting room was too small for a growing boy who had to move around as much as he did, and Ma had called him as he'd been mid-heel strike practice, and he'd turned toward the sound of her voice, and -

Then the wind in his eyes and the blood pumping through his veins and the look on his Ma's face as he ran the hell out of the house. The prospect of her disappointment terrified him more than anything.

Zell tore his eyes away from the table, but nowhere in the sitting room was safe now; every piece of furniture had a story in it. The TV screen flickered in his mind's eye - honed figures with muscles of taut steel and perfect martial form dancing fluidly through swathes of enemies. His boy-self lay flat on his belly in front of it, feet kicking aimlessly, eyes darting between the movie and the pages of a Combat King magazine spread out between his elbows.

A seagull keened somewhere outside, and in his memory it exploded through the open window, divebombing the screaming kid at the table for his sandwiches. The bustling shape of his mother burst into the room and caught its huge, thrashing body in the folds of a kitchen towel in only two tries.

The breeze from the same window fluttered through leaves of parchment scattered across the tabletop. Each ink design fought for distinction amongst its brothers, until her strong, calloused hands helped him isolate the potentials. She liked the one with powerful prongs of lightning darting out from a gentler curve. It would suit him, she said. Pa Dincht would have liked it, too.

Pa Dincht. The man's arm, gentle, warm and heavy around his small shoulders. The tattoo designs replaced by the yellowing paper of a thick photo album. Grainy images of Grandpa sprang to life from the pages, conjured by Pa's animated war stories.

The arm's absence. A cold void he'd been sensitive enough to feel but too young to really understand. Ma's iron jaw and and the steel cage of domestic pragmatism she locked her grief behind, except sometimes he could hear her muted tears from the kitchen, muffled beneath a turned-up music player. It was just the onions, she'd say. Sometimes he couldn't see any onions.

_ Enough! _

Apparently Guardian Forces didn't erase the memories - just squashed them down, archiving them away as nonessential. All it took was the right trigger to drag them out of storage.

Zell buried his face in his hands.

He couldn't deal with this.

_ The Dinchts in Balamb must have adopted you. _

Zell had lost track of the conversation for a little while after that, when they'd all just . . . carried on reminiscing, oblivious to the brick they'd just lobbed at his brain. Seifer's name had eventually jumped out and slapped him back to the now, but that brick had still taken out a window. The draft it let in was cold, unsettling, and every time he tried to fix it he kept cutting his hands on the glass.

If he had to care about it at all, he wished he could be angry. Anger was simple. Hell, he'd even take wobbly sadness and childish hurt over the huge, muddy pit of confusion that currently yawned in his soul. He didn't _ do _ confusion. He so intensely _ felt _ everything; every emotion bloomed in loud, vivid colour and just _ popped _ right out of his heart into being - easy to label, crystal in clarity, impossible not to wear on his sleeve because they were always so much bigger than he was. His peers and mentors had been telling him his whole life to 'keep his emotions under control', as if he wasn't _ already doing that_. If he stopped, he'd be an incandescent supernova.

He couldn't read himself this time, though. Zell had stepped out of the ruins of that basketball court with his roots ripped out from under him, and his entire world had been off-kilter by degrees ever since. His life with the Dinchts burned so brightly in his mind . . . but the orphanage lurked as its shadowy reflection. The lives seemed parallel, separate, not parts of the same whole. He'd taken his home, his town for granted all this time and now it was like they weren't really _ his _ -

"All right. Are you ready to tell me what's wrong?"

Zell dropped his hands. His mother stood in the archway, bearing a suspicious frown and a tea tray against one hip. In the second it took his eyes to focus, he saw two of her - and in the blurred space between the images, the faint spectre of a darker, slender figure.

Matron.

His heart skipped a beat. He laughed nervously, trying to blink away the vision. "Wrong? Nah, there's nothing-"

"Zell." She shook her head despairingly as she stooped to set the tray on the table. "Bless your heart, but you never could lie to save your life. You crept in here looking like you'd broken my best tea set, _ again_. Did you really think I wouldn't notice?" Amber liquid gushed steadily from the lips of the fish-shaped teapot; Ma Dincht poured two cups flawlessly and then settled down next to him. "Besides which, you've let me do _ all _ the talking so far. Does that sound like you? Hmm?"

Zell secured his tea. He needed something to hold onto, and it was either that or gripping the edge of the table like a man deranged. Matron's afterimage was seared on his eyeballs, a grey, morose ghost fighting with the solid, reassuring shape of the woman in front of him. And yet . . . in spite of Matron's quiet severity he remembered kindness, compassion. The featherlight weight of her pale hands against his cheeks, wiping away trails of tears. The hidden stormforce behind her reserved smile.

And who, before that? Who had brought him into the world in the first place? What had happened to her? Why couldn't she _ keep _ him? How different would his life have been if she had?

"Ma . . . I . . . need to tell you something."

She laid a hand on his arm. There was nothing wispy or ethereal about Ma, not like Matron; her grip was solid, an iron anchor to the table when she squeezed.

"I know there are lots of things you _ don't _ tell me. But I hope you know that you always _ can_, son."

He blinked up into the intensity of her face, scouring every crease and curve for any evidence of pretense. Any sign that she didn't mean exactly what she said with the word _ son_.

Instead, all he found was loving concern smouldering away in her dark eyes. Sincerity in the worried line of her mouth. And, GFs or no GFs, Zell couldn't remember ever seeing anything else.

_ I know you're not my real mom_. Those words, or something to that effect, had been poised on his tongue since the moment he got here. But how could he say that to Ma when she looked at him with eyes like that? Eyes that made him feel like he was her whole world?

Guilt burned like acid in his chest. Quistis had given him a strange look as they left the ruins of Trabia Garden. It had taken him this long to place it.

Envy.

It struck him how lucky he was - _ really _ struck him, a metaphysical punch to the gut. Luckier than Quistis, worshipped superficially by half the student body but who had rejected (or been rejected by?) her adoptive family.

Luckier than Selphie, desperately throwing affection and energy at a cast of thousands to compensate for those missing few at her roots.

Luckier than Irvine, faking the suave smooth-talking loner aesthetic to disguise the genuine sad, underconfident loner lurking beneath it.

Luckier than Seifer, sadistic asshole with his parade of terrible life choices whose only family were two dysfunctional stooges who would do whatever he commanded.

Luckier than Squall. _ Squall_. Squall goddamned Leonhart who he'd always looked up and thought was so cool; a calm and collected leader just like he imagined Grandpa had been. Squall wasn't cool, though, was he? He was an _ iceberg_, frigid and unreachable and alone even if you put him in a room of hundreds of people who knew his name.

_ God_, they were all so messed up.

That could have been him. _ That could have been him_. Hell, he wasn't perfect but at least he knew how to love and be loved. Ma Dincht hadn't given birth to him but she had _ chosen _ him and wasn't that _ better_? She had looked at the crying whiny snot-nosed pissbaby in that orphanage and somehow decided _ that's him_, _ that's the one_. Took a chance on him being a good son, and suddenly all Zell felt was very humbled and utterly inadequate.

It wasn't like him to be stuck for words. Ma leaned forward and gave his arm a stubborn shake.

"Zell. Whatever it is, you can tell me!"

He let go of the teacup. He needed both arms to lunge in and wrap around her waist in a bear hug fierce enough to provoke a gasp.

"I just missed you a lot, is all," he croaked.

Ma blasted the crown of his head with an exasperated sigh. "What's gotten into you today? You're too big for these shenanigans!" She draped her arms over him anyway, tugging him in close like he was eight again. "I _ know _ that's not what you were going to tell me. Something happened, didn't it?"

"Just Garden stuff. I can handle it. I'm okay." Maybe the close proximity would muffle all the ragged edges of his voice.

"Hmph." Her fingers tousled roughly through his hair. "I know you're a big tough mercenary now, and have a life of your own, but you'll always be my boy. No matter what trouble you're in, I'm here for you. You can always come home. You hear me?"

He _ was _ too big for this. He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried. But if he buried his face hard enough against his Ma's apron and nobody saw the tears, then surely they didn't count, right?


End file.
